posted on 11 Dec 2019

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World by Jan Karski

Some books defy conventional reviewing or criticism: you can only read with a sense of astonishment and a feeling of inadequacy. One such book is Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World by Jan Karski, one of the most extraordinary memoirs I have ever read. It recounts Karski’s time spent in the Polish underground resistance during the second world war. It was first published in the US in 1944 – before the war had even ended, note – at which time Karski was still only just thirty years old.

He was a debonair young student, a party-goer, and almost certainly poised for a glittering career when Poland was invaded. He received his mobilisation papers and joined his regiment at officer training school – initially as dashing and as care-free an existence as he had enjoyed before the war.

This would change dramatically when the Nazis invaded, however. Fleeing the approaching German forces he was captured by the Russians and taken across the border to be imprisoned in Soviet territory. He narrowly avoided the Katyn massacre of officers and then escaped during an exchange of prisoners with the Reich authorities. Managing to get back across the Polish border he was inducted into the Polish underground resistance. This all happens in the first few dozen pages of the book. It was 1939; Karski was barely twenty-five.

I was initially slightly confused by this book because it is typically presented as being Karski’s account of how he came to be the first person to bring a first-hand, eye-witness account of the extermination of the Jews to Allied leaders in both Europe and the US. And it is perfectly true, he did do this, and it is almost certainly the primary reason that this courageous individual has gone down in history and will never be forgotten. But in terms of its overall structure, this particular episode only occupies the final section – though it makes for no less gruelling a read because of this. The larger part of the book is actually an inside account – and possibly the only one? – of how to organise, maintain and ensure discipline in what amounts to an underground ‘secret state’ and it is to this that the book’s sub-title makes reference.

For the Polish underground was characterised by a complete re-establishing of all branches of the Polish state but in such a fashion that it could function underground. Karski’s role might almost be said to be that of an ‘underground civil servant’: carrying documents and intelligence, liaising between the various branches of the underground, representing the views of the divergent political parties that maintained underground ‘battalions’, distributing underground press and propaganda, and eventually acting as international emissary from the underground to the Polish government-in-exile (which incidentally was regarded as being accountable to the underground – not the other way round) and the Allied forces more generally.

After barely a year of active service in the underground, Karski was captured by the Nazis and savagely tortured. He tried to commit suicide rather than submit to further beatings but failed and was eventually helped to escape by other underground members – their orders, in fact, were to rescue him or, if this proved impossible, to kill him. He recuperated over several months and resumed underground duties.

For all that I have read elsewhere about various aspects of the resistance movements during the second world war, this is without doubt the most detailed and what it reveals is a shadow-state whose discipline, conventions and policies constituted iron laws which – once democratically agreed – must be adhered to. This makes for fascinating reading; but I also found that it makes the extraordinary circumstances the book describes somehow more understandable. This is not underground resistance as dashing, devil-may-care armed action. It is the grinding, nerve-shredding daily vigilance that is required in order to avoid the Nazis’ jails and torture-cellars.

The Polish underground maintained a line of ‘absolute resistance’ by which is meant no exceptions, zero collaboration, an occupation that always and in every circumstance met with resistance, no matter how harsh the reprisals carried out by the Nazis as part of their ‘collective responsibility’ policy.

Karski acknowledges that this caused all underground members to make nightmarish moral decisions. But he also adamant in saying that there was no alternative: no matter how many prisoners might be executed, no matter how many local villagers might be dragged from their beds and shot against a wall in the village square, the underground could not allow its unbending line of ‘absolute resistance’ to be modified because of German reprisals. Sometimes, however, particularly in rural areas, the Nazis would post lists of those who had already been earmarked as reprisal ‘candidates’ in the event of underground actions taking place. These victims were almost certainly known to the underground and were in some cases dear friends. Nonetheless, Karski explains, the only modification allowed was that in these instances planned actions would be undertaken by underground members from another locality – because they could act with greater personal disengagement in such circumstances, and thus more effectively.

As I say, the final part of the book – and certainly the part that makes for the hardest reading – concerns the undercover mission Karski took to witness at first-hand what was happening in the Warsaw ghetto, culminating in seeing the selections and the transports in which Jews were crammed thousands at a time into cattle-wagons already filled inches deep with quick-lime. This was the news that Karski brought to the Allies, this was his report to the world – this is what proved so shocking, so unimaginable, that some Allied leaders found it impossible to believe.

Story of a Secret State is an unforgettable and wholly necessary book but one I was glad to finish. I found it a demanding read. It immerses the reader in a truly terrifying world, one that required unimaginable moral and physical courage and in which the penalty for failure could be guaranteed to exceed your worst nightmares.

Jan Karski became a US citizen in 1954 and was to live – astonishingly – for a further forty-six years in America, dying in Washington DC in 2000.

 

Alun Severn

December 2019